Political Memes

In my experience wirh coke heads... never by coke from them. The other drugs are alright, but still worse then someone else. But you should never do business with them unless you have to.

Polymarket and Kalshi are just an old mob numbers game but with the veneer of being accepted

Please ban all online betting and only make it legal at places where you have to actually go there in person to do. Impulse gambling on smartphones and prediction markets are straight cancer to society.

It's only gambling if you don't know the outcome!

Correct answer. It creates extremely perverse incentives in society to allow people to bet on large scale harm.

Unless you're privy to some insider information you can make bets about. Then you absolutely should.

I don't like gambling. I worry about regulation driving it underground, though. I'd rather just see winnings taxed heavily, immediately and without exception or deduction. Invest it in social safety nets and it's effectively forcing the winners to share their loot with the most vulnerable of the people they're victimizing.

Boiling frogs.

1. Farmers want a way to sell their crops before harvest time to guarantee a certain price, so they're protected by unpredictable swings in price. A market is set up for commodity futures, so a speculator can take that deal, and maybe make a lot of money if the price she sets with the farmer is well below the actual market value. This is seen as a good thing because the farmer gets to reduce their risk, while someone else gets the opportunity to make money by taking that risk on the farmer's behalf.
2. This system expands like a cancer, so professional investors are soon buying derivatives on all kinds of things. Sometimes this is arguably good for the world, but many times it's just complex gambling, and it results in the housing-based financial collapse of 2007-08. Hedge funds and investment bankers manage to convince the regulators to let them keep the system as is, despite the crash.
3. Wall street pushes to allow random people with no financial power, no training, no knowledge to also be able to get involved with derivatives, because having idiots on the other side of their bets is great for their bottom lines. It's much easier to make money from some random person using an app than it is to make money off another professional investor.
4. Some clever person manages to reskin a gambling app as if it were an investment app, and allows people to "buy derivatives contracts" on just about anything. Nobody honestly believes that this is anything other than gambling. But, the regulators are all compromised and toothless, so now you can gamble on any of the 4 horsemen: war, famine, death or disease.

The answer to all of your question is: The US.

You can bet on anything, man. It's like Money Plane but with words writing.

The point is this bullshit market can influence decisions, like whether to have a nuclear strike on Iran -you think a Trump family member would not try to cash in on that?

System of a Bitch

How do we make non-religious churches for decent people? Can we start that movement and move up from there?

That's already a thing.

https://www.sundayassembly.org/home

Fairly certain that there are a few AI engines doing exactly that. If I was in charge of a large news organization, I’d absolutely be monitoring these markets for this type of bet.